Tag Archives | Ecstasy

Ecstasy Is New Drug Of Choice For PTSD

By majestic on November 21, 2012 in News 7

Rick Doblin has been one of the few medical doctors in the United States, or actually make that more or less anywhere in the developed world, willing to stick his neck out and conduct clinical trials of psychedelic drugs.

His work has been variously profiled by the alternative press (including, of course, Under The Influence: The Disinformation Guide to Drugs), but it seems that his time may finally have come for some mainstream acceptance. Benedict Carey profiles the work of Doblin’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) organization for the New York Times:

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection.

… Read the rest

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Scientific Study Reveals That Ecstasy Damages Memory

By Matt Staggs on July 26, 2012 in News 24

Via LiveScience:

A study conducted by German scientists has revealed that using the popular party drug Ecstasy (MDMA) can cause deterioration of memory:

Among Ecstasy users, the researchers found a deterioration in a memory task called paired associates learning, in which people memorize pairs of words or objects so that the presentation of one triggers the recall of the other. None of the other cognitive tasks showed significant differences between users and nonusers, Wagner said. The specificity of the deficit suggests damage to the hippocampus, he said, the part of the brain that is crucial for memory formation and recall.

(Another point of interest from the study: it’s apparently difficult to find MDMA users who don’t also smoke marijuana.)

The Incredible Krystle Cole Trip

By majestic on October 11, 2011 in News 8

Vice presents the wild trip of Krystle Cole as part of its Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia series:

There is no facile synthesis of the events that transpired at the Wamego missile silo between October 1 and November 4, 2000. The available information is a viscous solution of truths, half-lies, three-quarter truths, and outright lies, the fractionation of which yields no pure product. The dramatis personae are many and varied. The chemicals in question often obscure and untested…

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Ecstasy As Cancer Cure

By majestic on August 20, 2011 in News 17

Ecstasy (MDMA)

Who would have thought – popping an E could cure cancer! From BBC News:

Modified ecstasy could one day have a role to play in fighting some blood cancers, according to scientists.

Ecstasy is known to kill some cancer cells, but scientists have increased its effectiveness 100-fold, they said in Investigational New Drugs journal.

Their early study showed all leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma cells could be killed in a test tube, but any treatment would be a decade away.

A charity said the findings were a “significant step forward”.

In 2006, a research team at the University of Birmingham showed that ecstasy and anti-depressants such as Prozac had the potential to stop cancers growing.

The problem was that it needed doses so high they would have been fatal if given to people.

The researchers, in collaboration with the University of Western Australia, have chemically re-engineered ecstasy by taking some atoms away and putting new ones in their place.

… Read the rest

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O Magazine Touts The Wonders Of Ecstasy

By JacobSloan on February 23, 2011 in News 48

468019_0b823646bf The Oprah Magazine comes out in favor of MDMA as a therapeutic wonder drug, attempting to dispel hysterical, ‘rave’-related media cliches (propagated by Oprah herself, among others) along the way. Writer Jessica Winter tried MDMA for the first time for the sake of the article, and describes the enormous personal benefit she gained in the weeks after:

To a layperson, the notion of using a drug like Ecstasy as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma might make as much sense as adding cocaine to a diabetic’s weight loss regimen. Ecstasy was the signature stimulant fueling a worldwide party culture in the 1980s and ’90s, epitomized by massive all-night dance “raves” crammed with blissed-out revelers and pulsating with electronic music at festivals and exurban warehouses across North America and Europe.

Yet MDMA’s beginnings were innocent, even banal. In 1912 it was included as an intermediate chemical in a patent that the German pharmaceutical company Merck filed for an antibleeding medication.

… Read the rest

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Using Psychedelics To Treat Depression

By majestic on August 24, 2010 in News 44

Ecstasy (MDMA)

It’s been a long struggle, more or less since the days of Timothy Leary and Albert Hofmann in the ’60s, but doctors and scientists are finally being allowed to treat depression with some of the most effective drugs known to them: psychedelics. Anne Harding reports for CNN/Health.com:

Pamela Sakuda, 57, was anxious and depressed. After two years of intensive chemotherapy for late-stage colon cancer, and having outlived her prognosis by several months, she’d finally lost hope. She was living in fear and was worried how her impending death would affect her husband.

Sakuda’s doctor prescribed antidepressants, but they didn’t do any good. So, at her wits’ end and feeling that she had nothing to lose, Sakuda volunteered for an experimental depression treatment being studied at UCLA.

In January 2005, with a pair of trained therapists at her side, Sakuda took a pill of psilocybin — a hallucinogen better known as the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms.”

It may seem far-fetched that a psychedelic drug associated with muddy hippies at Woodstock would help a cancer patient at a university hospital.

… Read the rest

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How I Met Trent Reznor on Ecstasy at the Charles Manson murder house

By moezilla on July 4, 2010 in News 5

Mondo 2000 Imagine taking ecstasy at the site of the Charles Manson murders — with Timothy Leary — and then meeting Trent Reznor, Anthony Kiedas (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), and Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers. “With the ecstasy coming on, the entire L.A. media world started to seem like a serene and glittery playground filled with happy children playing grownup and I settled into a comfort zone. The world was a friendly place. Relatively speaking, of course.”

Until they saw a handwritten sign that said “COME IN HERE TO BE KILLED”….

The former editor of Mondo 2000 magazine remembers partying at the former Manson murder house in 1992. Behind the door, he reports, were “Seventeen Illuminati figures, including Marilyn Monroe, George H.W. Bush, David Bowie and The Penguin, all in black robes, huddled over Britney Spears, laying in the center of a Pentagram while Reznor raised his blade.

“OK. I just made that up.… Read the rest

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Treating Agony With Ecstasy

By Raymond on January 21, 2010 in News 1

From Discover Magazine:

Post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD—can linger years after someone has experienced or witnessed something extremely upsetting. It may be accompanied by panic attacks, flashbacks, and nightmares, and it can be fiendishly difficult to treat. But experimental types of treatment could soon lend a hand.

In a pilot study, South Carolina psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer is targeting PTSD with a controversial drug: methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. He gave MDMA, along with psychotherapy, to 21 participants who had developed treatment-resistant PTSD as a result of experiences with crime or war. Only 15 percent of the MDMA-treated subjects continued to experience PTSD afterward, as opposed to 85 percent of the subjects who received psychotherapy with a placebo. Mithoefer considers the findings especially notable given that 20 of the 21 participants had previously failed to obtain relief from FDA-approved treatments. “The next step is to find out if this can be replicated elsewhere,” he says.

… Read the rest

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The Secret War Over Ecstasy

By moezilla on January 8, 2010 in News 4

Oliver Hockenhull writes on h+ magazine:

A documentary maker reveals the startling history of Ecstasy. In the 1960s some psychotherapists were treating alcoholism and neurosis with LSD — and in 1957 a Catholic church monsignor in Vancouver even wrote a prayer for LSD trips. (“We humbly ask our Heavenly Mother the Virgin, help of all who call upon her to know and understand the true qualities of these psychedelics…”) But after LSD was made illegal, psychiatrists struggled to keep MDMA (Ecstasy) from suffering the same fate for the next two decades…

MDMA was promoted in the 1970s by a senior research scientist at Dow Chemicals, but in 1985 it was still declared a Schedule One drug — illegal with no medical use — though it’s been shown to dramatically enhance psychotherapy, especially for post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s even considered safe — one professor wrote in the Journal of Psychopharmacology that “There is not much difference between the dangers of horse-riding and the dangers of ecstasy.”

And according to the United Nations, the world already consumes 125 tons of Ecstasy each year…

UK Drugs Chief: Alcohol and Cigarettes More Dangerous Than Ecstasy, LSD and Cannabis

By majestic on October 29, 2009 in News 10

The Belfast Telegraph reports:

The British Government’s chief drug adviser has sparked controversy by claiming ecstasy, LSD and cannabis are less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.

Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, attacked the decision to make cannabis a class B drug.

He accused former home secretary Jacqui Smith, who reclassified the drug, of “distorting and devaluing” scientific research.

Prof Nutt said smoking cannabis created only a “relatively small risk” of psychotic illness. And he claimed advocates of moving ecstasy into class B from class A had “won the intellectual argument”.

All drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should be ranked by a “harm” index, he said, with alcohol coming fifth behind cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, and methadone.

Tobacco should rank ninth, ahead of cannabis, LSD and ecstasy.

Prof Nutt said: “No one is suggesting that drugs are not harmful. The critical question is one of scale and degree.

… Read the rest

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